Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Text Rendering Hates You

gankra.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 172 posts

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#101

Post by ahuth »

ainar-g wrote: post #57
gravitas wrote: post #39

I find it... odd that an article on font rendering is using a 14px forced font size (default: 16px) making the article really hard to read on my 14" laptop screen from a foot away. Subpixel antialiasing on my LCD screen is just not my problem here, author. :)

I am a partially vision-impaired man, and I really can't stand the dark-grey on light-grey texts that a lot of modern web pages have. They are essentially unreadable to me. In order to comfortably read this article, I had to go to Firefox's Style Editor and make the text actually black. And it is ironic that an article about text rendering uses such low-contrast and small-sized text.

Background is white and the text is #333. Contrast ratio is 12.63:1, which isn’t bad at all.

Can’t really fault the author here

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#103

Post by dictum »

stefanfisk wrote: post #64
dictum wrote: post #37

> Mercifully, subpixel has become less relevant over the years: retina displays really don't need it, and the subpixel layout on phones, prevents the trick from working (without major work). On newer versions of macos, subpixel-aa of text is disabled at the OS level by default. Speaking of mercy, I wish Apple had disabled it only on hidpi displays and chosen a longer deprecation window for normal displays. I prefer k…

Have you tried `defaults write -g CGFontRenderingFontSmoothingDisabled -bool NO`? (also needs a reboot)

Yep, but some say it's gone from Catalina. I don't try betas. Can someone on 10.15 verify that this still works?

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#104

Post by lostgame »

frou_dh wrote: post #7

High-DPI (namely 200+ DPI, aka Retina) text rendering on desktop computers is one of the more impactful hardware developments for programmers in a while. When you're looking at text all day every day, having every single glyph take a massive step up in fidelity (4x the pixel budget!) is not to be sneezed at.

It has also affected the Print industry in a major way.

No longer is there much need to have a 200+ DPI difference between your display and what you’re printing.

Gone are the days of zooming way way in to a page-sized PS document - it’s just the size it will be for print.

For my girlfriend, this was super important.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#105

Post by cosmotic »

lostgame wrote: post #102

I miss non-AA’d text. Like PalmOS or Windows 95. Gotta love the sharpness of it somehow.

I agree; I disable antialiasing to the best degree that I can when I code. This is not possible on Retina displays on MacOS though because they render at a higher resolution then down-sample.

I was pretty disappointed the original article didn't talk much about hinting.

Even old operating systems did a great job at type hinting to align glyphs to pixels (even when antialiasing is on). "Modern" operating systems (especially MacOS after Mavericks) assume retina and throw hinting to the wind; the consequence is pervasive blurry text even on retina displays.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#106

Post by privethedge »

> If you're in Safari or Edge, this might still look ok! If you're in Firefox or Chrome, it looks awful, like this: https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/transparent-cur...

It doesn't look awful in Firefox, it looks perfect (it's version 26 of Firefox though.) This is what I see https://i.imgur.com/sjvqycv.png

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#107

Post by Jasper_ »

hsivonen wrote: post #93
bloopernova wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the difference between ttf and otf? And that's why certain fonts look slightly different between platforms! This is a serious revelation to me. Thank you. I've been having to switch between my Mac laptop, Linux workstation, Windows 10 workstation, and Windows 10 Amazon Workspace a lot. It's been frustrating seeing the small differences but being unable to really figure out what was going on.

The format of outlines is only difference between .ttf and .otf, yes. .ttf has quardratic Bézier curves and hinting is done by interpreted programs (on Windows; TrueType has generate hints at run-time). .otf has cubic Bézier curves and declarative hints. The outline format of .otf comes from Adobe Type 1 fonts (.otf really is just .ttf with outline format taken from Type 1), so the .otf outline format is the older on…

OpenType also supports the TrueType glyph format [0], and it's the dominant glyph format in most OTF files I could find. Really, OpenType is just CFF / Type 2 Fonts and TrueType smushed together in a single file.

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/gl...

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#108

Post by kitten_mittens_ »

privethedge wrote: post #106

> If you're in Safari or Edge, this might still look ok! If you're in Firefox or Chrome, it looks awful, like this: https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/transparent-cur... It doesn't look awful in Firefox, it looks perfect (it's version 26 of Firefox though.) This is what I see https://i.imgur.com/sjvqycv.png

Mobile Safari is giving me the color stacking in your second link.

Re: Text Rendering Hates You

#109

Post by ainar-g »

jfk13 wrote: post #72
ainar-g wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a partially vision-impaired man, and I really can't stand the dark-grey on light-grey texts that a lot of modern web pages have. They are essentially unreadable to me. In order to comfortably read this article, I had to go to Firefox's Style Editor and make the text actually black. And it is ironic that an article about text rendering uses such low-contrast and small-sized text.

> In order to comfortably read this article, I had to go to Firefox's Style Editor and make the text actually black Does the Reader View in Firefox help here?

Completely forgot about it. Yes, it does improve readability for me.
Post reply on HN